Queens' Play (36 page)

Just before the roof fell, two pillagers bolder than the rest managed to enter the Hôtel Moûtier from the back, and found what they took to be a fellow plunderer overcome by smoke. Kicked awake out of a simple curiosity, the stranger offered them what appeared to be an excellent proposition: a large sum of money in exchange for a private trip in their handcart to a certain address.

Since there was nothing worth taking, the two men lost no time in arguing; which was lucky for them. Between them they had no trouble in getting the fellow doubled up under sheets in the cart, and were trundling off down the packed street, away from the fire, just as Tosh, without seeing them, picked his way up it.

The house called Doubtance in the Rue des Papegaults had no signboard; its trade was well known.

Above the usurer occupying the ground floor, lived the Dame de Doubtance, of whom he was her keeper, some said, or her owner; an unredeemed pledge like the others which heaped and lined all his rooms, naked and mouldering like picked mice in an eyrie.

The Dame de Doubtance was old; but her private world was even older: the world of France three hundred years before when chivalry was in flower, and the troubadours sang. Moving, in her mediaeval robes, from books to lute to embroidery, she never emerged into the raw, humanist light of sixteenth-century Blois; but many people came visiting her for the out-of-the-way things she could tell them, if she chose. Sometimes, if she did not choose, they came stumbling down the steep stairs of Doubtance with a scratched arm or the graze of a thrown vase on one cheek. For she was not a mouse; but rather a tall, half-plumed predator, pale-spot eyes glaring, mouth flatly downturned into the jaw. And she had a temper.

The usurer Gaultier she never assaulted. Periodically, his clients repaired the deficiency. It was a risk of his trade. Small, opinionative, shrewd, he was no more rapacious than any merchant in Blois, and loved the rough and tumble of business with a passion almost Italian-ate. He also had a true eye for workmanship; and a fine piece of statuary, once in his hands, rarely found itself redeemed.

It was his treasures which he first thought, naturally, of saving, that grey February day when fire broke out at the top of the road. With his clerk and an apprentice to help, he began loading his wheelbarrow, stopping often to engage his clerk in raucous arguments about workmanship and costing. Soon the wheelbarrow was full and
dispatched down the steep road to the river, already crowded with the womenfolk and possessions of the richer and wiser residents.

It was the only conveyance he had, and he could do nothing until it returned. Maître Gaultier went back alone to his dark nest of bric-à-brac and, fierce-eyed, began to cull his other favourites therefrom. As he emerged for the sixth time to his threshold, bearing a clock dear to his heart, he saw a miracle coming towards him in the flurried bustle of the street: a four-wheeled handcart, propelled by one heated individual and steadied by another, which bumped down the steep incline of the street, headed straight towards Doubtance and stopped flat beside Master Gaultier’s astrolabe clock as if scenting its destiny.

Almost before the owners of the cart had pushed it into the forecourt and had uncovered and explained the unconscious man inside, Georges Gaultier had bought the cart and its contents and had dismissed the disreputable pair. He had no time just then to consider the implications of what they told him, or even to do more than compare briefly the face of the man they had brought with a description once given him by Archie Abernethy. The moneylender was accustomed to job lots. Drunk or not drunk, the less important item could wait. With a deft heave, Georges Gaultier removed the senseless man lumbering the bottom of his precious conveyance, and stowed him out of the way under the stairs to recover.

Stacking the handcart after that, Georges Gaultier from time to time looked all around him; he at least had no quarrel with his fellow men.

Once, imagining a stirring behind, he turned his head on his shoulder and said practically, for the benefit of anyone who might be listening; ‘My friend, you will need to put on a better face than that before your wife sees you. If you go upstairs, Madame will clear the fumes from your head. The fire will only come this way should the wind change, and men walk faster than clocks.’

In the end, he snatched time from his labours to turn indoors, and grasping the man’s singed and dusty cloak, lifted him six steps out of the way to the first quarter landing. The fellow opened his eyes. Master Gaultier grinned, and raising his pebbly voice, addressed the inhabitant upstairs. ‘Madame! A visitor!’

They were the first coherent words Francis Crawford understood since leaving the burning house up the street. Dimly, he remembered the plunderers who had carried him out; the bargain he had made in the hope that Gaultier, knowing his history from Abernaci, might pay; the subsequent bumping journey in the cart to this house whose address Abernaci had given him, long ago. And now a voice, hoarse and offhand, bawling, ‘Madame! A visitor!’

And by then Lymond, with a kind of brutal persistence, had got
himself upright. His good hand, groping, felt the cold wood of a stair rail. He leaned on it, all his weight on his serviceable leg, and looked up, straight into the pouched eyes of a woman, whose papery skin, in soft, unfolded swags, hung from her brittle, down-peering bones. Two long braids, thickly plaited and impossibly gold, dangled gently swaying from a wimpled headdress out of fashion a century ago. Her robes were long, flat and flowing, without a farthingale, and her nostrils above the creased and confident mouth were antique and wide.

There was a pause, which Lymond occupied at some cost by standing straight and still, his head thrown back and his breathing nicely controlled. The Gothic face in the gloom far above him seemed to smile.
‘Aucassins, damoisiax, sire!’
the Dame de Doubtance observed, in brisk mediaeval quotation; and
Christ!
thought Lymond, thrown into mild hysteria by the greeting. And hazily he sought an apt quotation in return.

He never did recollect much, except in nightmares, of the subsequent exchange; although he never felt quite the same again about the ballad
Aucassin and Nicolette
. At one point out of dire necessity, he was driven to saying,
‘Hé Dieus, douce créature
.… If I fall, sweet being, I shall fracture my neck; and if I remain here, they will take and burn me at the stake.’

And after a moment, thinly autocratic, her voice had observed, ‘Aucassin:
le beau, le blond.…
You are hurt:
le sang vous coule des bras
. You are bleeding in fifty places at least.…’ And at last, collecting her skirts with smooth deliberation, the woman began to move downstairs towards him even as he spoke.

Afterwards, he remembered looking up at her, the brocade robe hooked over her arm, her old, ribbed ankle in its pointed slipper two steps above. Remotely entertained, even then, by the crazy parallel between his affairs and the ballad, he remembered trying very hard, halfway into a thorough faint, to pay her the obvious compliment: ‘
And thus the pilgrim was cured.
’ He did succeed in saying it, but that was all; and of his final journey upstairs to the Dame de Doubtance’s bed he had no recollection.

He wakened twice: once out of a feverish dream to the sound of virginals. He was then in her chamber, a dark, thick-walled cave
filled with old books and embroidery, watching her yellow, high-nosed profile as she played. He seemed to be strapped up again; under the bandaging the pain already, surely, seemed to be less.

He saw her finish playing and, rising, come over. A reader of horoscopes, Abernaci had said. Hazily, other things one had heard about the Dame de Doubtance came back. Uncannily well-informed, endlessly inquisitive and unnaturally detached, they said. In her day, she had been accused of practising the black arts, but nothing had ever been proved.… Certainly she seemed to have no interest in acquiring money or power for herself. Her charts were her children; her life was devoted to collecting the facts with which to plot them. Unshockable, old in years and in wisdom, her philosophy of life was just, they said, but harshly just. All the troubles of the soul, after all, were merely a line upon a chart.

When she was close enough, Lymond spoke: a sentence of thanks; a sentence asking her to tell Abernaci of his presence.

Stupidly, he had used English. The old face on its long, gristly neck was attentive, the thick braids still. Then her groined, flamboyant right hand, heavy with queer rings, touched his lips, sealing them. ‘
Or se chante
,” she said, ‘Rumours fly. They are searching from house to house. Speak your own tongue to me or Gaultier if you must, but to no one else.… What was the day and hour of your birth?’

It was the English, mauled and unregarded, of a person who spoke many languages and left them broken-hinged and crumbled like clams, solely attacked for the meat. She had not asked when he was born. When he told her what she wanted to know she stared at him for a long time with her squinting, intense gaze, and it came to him suddenly that she knew this already. As the thought entered his head she smiled, the narrow, rubbery cheeks crushed apart, the mouth wide, authoritative and tight. ‘You are perceptive. I knew your grandfather,’ she said. ‘Sometimes he speaks to me still.’

Lymond said, ‘He is dead.’ That was true, of course. The first Lord Culter, his brilliant grandfather, beloved in Scotland and France, after whom he was named, had died many years before. Only, spoken to her, the words were foolish; he had uttered them as a defence. Somehow, he realized, she had known his grandfather. Certainly she had known he was dead. What else she knew he could not guess. But in the stillness he could sense her mind, firm, powerful, grotesque, scaling the ramparts of his.

He did not know how long the silence lasted, their wills interlocked; but somewhere someone let out a long breath, slowly and nearly inaudibly, and the grey, crocketed fingers lay again for a moment on his brow. ‘You keep your secrets well,’ she said. ‘Make my compliments to Sybilla.’ Then, as if a gentle harness had collapsed, he lost all sense of her and of the room once again.

The next time was brief. He was not in bed, but lying cold on some sacks, sharing a minute closet with a little treasury of precious articles; and the room outside the closet was being searched.

He heard stiff questions and unaccustomed civilities: the men at arms and their lieutenant were a good deal in awe of the Dame de Doubtance. A peephole, through which he had no strength to look, threw a single arc of blue light. With idle fingers, Lymond touched the mother-of-pearl and the bronze, the little lacquers and the bracelets so close to his head.

Then the searchers had gone, apparently satisfied; and the door of the little treasure house opened, and he was carried from his hiding place back to bed. For a moment he had the illusion that it was Oonagh O’Dwyer bent over him, with long, incongruous gold hair; then he realized that it was the Dame de Doubtance herself, with the little usurer’s head at her shoulder; and behind that, smiling, the dark, turbaned face of Abernaci.

And now it was simple. All he had to do was frame the instruction which had been gripped clearly in his mind since he wakened, the four words he had rehearsed over and over to say.

Jammed by God knew what tensions, by fever and drugs, by lacerated muscles and an exhaustion of mind and body, his voice would not answer him. For a moment, in the stress, sight vanished too, and he was left in a void, silent, blinded, able to communicate nothing.

But he must. But he would
.

His eyes shut, Lymond lay and forced panic out of his brain; freed his mind and found, waiting, a block of clear, untrodden thought standing silent for his message.

There was a pause, which to the watchers round the bed seemed interminable. Then the Dame de Doubtance, an odd light in her faded eyes, turned from the silent bed and addressed the mahout in brisk French. ‘Take him to Sevigny,’ she said.